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“Time to meet the devil,” a character says in the ultra-violent Only God Forgives, but it sounds more like the personal manifesto of director Nicolas Winding Refn.

Having reluctantly attracted the mainstream with Drive, his stylish wheel-squealer with Ryan Gosling that earned Refn the Best Director prize at Cannes 2012, the Danish auteur seems determined to return to the hellish outlands of contemporary film.

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Drive was brooding and bloody, but Only God Forgives goes even further, almost to the point of comic absurdity.

Set in the red-light district of Bangkok, bathed in neon hues and running almost in slow motion, it has Gosling as a nearly mute drug dealer, zombie-like in his physicality, with a sexual psycho for a brother and a foul-mouthed harridan for a mother.

The mom is played against type by the usually demure Kristin Scott Thomas, whose character Crystal talks like a stevedore and is seeking revenge for a brutal act perpetrated against her family.

Told of the heinous rape and murder of a 16-year-old prostitute that sets the plot (or what passes for it) in motion, Crystal coldly says of the sex killer: “I’m sure he had his reasons.”

She wants her son Julian (Gosling) to man up and get her the payback she craves, even if it means filling the twisting back alleys with bullets and blood.

Julian is co-owner of a Muay Thai boxing club with his unhinged brother Billy (Tom Burke), but their real occupation is drug trafficking.

They’re all facing the avenging samurai wrath of a karaoke-crooning ex-cop, played by Thai actor Vithaya Pansringarm, who considers himself to be on a mission from God — or perhaps he’s God Almighty himself.

The gore quotient in the film is high even for Winding Refn. He has tested audience limits in such earlier films as Pusher, Fear X, Valhalla Rising, Bronson and, more recently and broadly, with Drive (witness the skull-crushing brutality of that film’s notorious elevator scene).

Only God Forgives outdoes them all, with eye gouging, head piercing and an appalling act of desecration of a body that shouldn’t be described here, other than to say it might well have sent Sigmund Freud calling for his mommy.

It’s possibly the least glamorous and also least interesting role Gosling has ever had. It’s not likely to expand his fan base much, or Refn’s for that matter.

This seems to be exactly the reaction Refn was seeking. At the press conference following the film’s press preview at Cannes in May, where it attracted many loud boos, Refn described himself as “a pornographer” and admitted he’s fascinated by violence just for the hell of it.

“I have surely a fetish for violent emotion and violent images and I can’t explain where it comes from.”

Viewers of Only God Forgives might well have similar trouble figuring out Refn’s disturbing thought processes.

There’s no question that he’s in command of his images and audio. Working again with the Fear X and Bronson cinematographer Larry Smith and his Drive composer Cliff Martinez, Refn toils like a satanic fashion designer, flooding the frame with bloodshot visions.

Where he loses all control, this time at least, is as a storyteller. Refn seems content merely to shock people, with characters who do and say heinous things but exhibit no motivation beyond trying to one-up one another for gratuitous gore.

When Crystal lowers herself yet another rung by discussing the phallic physical attributes of her two sons, you wonder if perhaps Refn isn’t including himself in that particularly vile conversation, too.

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